My Maxtor 80GB crashed. I replaced it with a new HD with XP. I put the old MAx as a slave and when I boot, I get Primary Slave Hard Disk Error, press F4 for setup. the BIOS DOES detect the slave. Just can't get anywhere past the setup. Do I need to reload the OS? Will I loose my data by doing so? I need to attempt to retrieve the data off this drive. Can someone guide me through it? Thanks in advance

You may have a jumper setting on the main HD > master with slave .

Checked the jumpers. They are in the correct position. MAster jumper set on Main Slave set on 2nd. Weird too, after I went to f4, I got into command prompt. came up as D:\Dos then did C: and it did not recognize the drive. Yet BOTH the Master and Slave are visible in the Bios. Maybe the slave is totally fried and I just cant get into it! Any other suggestions?

"MAster jumper set on Main" Not what I suggested you check . Here it is again . On the main HD > master with slave . In other words , you may have Master , Master with Slave , Slave & there may be other jumper settings .

Another thought , Master with Slave , may be called MS .

Nothing has worked thus far. I managed to try to run hard drive test from DOS.. doesnt recognize the HDD. Thanks for the help, but Im giving in.. How I love Humility! GRRRR

I had a similar problem; bought a new hd (maxtor 80gb diamondmax plus9) to start with xp pro. Thought I could put my old hd (same type maxtor but with less cache & win 98)as slave and copy my data to the new one. Caused me much trouble similar to what you can find on the net. I was able to solve my problems by buying an (80 wire)ide ata round cable to replace the flatcable. On both disks I put the jumpersettings = cable select (cs).[Maxtor's jumper settings as illustrated on the disk differ from what I found on their website in a disk manual, & confused me: so go for the cs setting.] New disk with xp on end of cable. Old disk on slave position (middle of cable). Had to quick format (I chose ntfs) the old disk as it was ok for win xp but could nevertheless not be accessed. After this quick format I could access the old hd. With 'ontrack data recovery software' I was at last able to regain most of my data. Let ontrack search for fat (32 in my case)partitions and recover the data. Took me a few days to figure it all out, get the cable & soft. So be patient if you don't want to loose your data... Hope this may be of help to someone out there. Regards.